Best selling author and Cannabis expert DOUG FINE will join The Power hour to talk about how for nearly a century, it's been illegal to grow industrial hemp in the United States-and how Cannabis could be used to stimulate the economy. The billion-dollar plant that's going to change our diet and farms, help restore our soil, and wean us from petroleum.

After college, Doug Fine strapped on a backpack and traveled to five continents, reporting from remote forests and war zones in Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala and Tajikistan. He files radio work for NPR and PRI and is the author ofFarewell, My Subaru and Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man. His print work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Salon, U.S. News and World Report, The Christian Science Monitorand Outside. Fine lives in a remote valley in New Mexico among a few goats and many coyotes. Visit him online at www.dougfine.com. Fine enjoys hiking, running, kayaking, shamanistic drumming, dancing, gardening, siestas, Peter Sellers movies, hot springs, massages, reading and staying alive. He is not quite competent at the saxophone, though he can catch a mean salmon.

The billion-dollar plant that's going to change our diet and farms, help restore our soil, and wean us from petroleum.

Turns out your roommate with the lava lamp was right. Get ready for the game changing plant that's going to feed the world and free us from fossil fuels while putting small farmers back to work. Yes, a writer of Doug Fine's renown realized going in that the stat sheet on hemp sounded almost too good: its fibers are among the planet's strongest, its seed oil the most nutritious, and its potential as an energy source vast and untapped? But he's just researched it from the field, and guess what? It's all true. In fact he's uncovered new locavore energy application models that could and should change the energy economy (and improve the atmosphere) forever.

Hemp's one downside? For nearly a century, it's been effectively illegal to grow industrial cannabis in the United States-even though Betsy Ross wove the nation's first flag out of hemp fabric, Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence on it, and colonists could pay their taxes with it. But as the prohibition on hemp's psychoactive cousin winds down, one of humanity's longest-utilized plants is about to be reincorporated into the American economy. Get ready for the newest billion-dollar industry.

Video:HEMP BOUND by Doug Fine After two years spent researching the world's hemp fields and factories from Manitoba to Belgium, comedic investigative journalist, author and solar-powered goat herder Doug Fine has emerged with his new book HEMP BOUND. His overall message? Your roommate with the lava lamp was right: hemp really does play a major role in humanity's economy and climate mitigation project.